"The gravest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-intentioned, but without understanding." - Justice Louis Brandeis

Thursday, April 23, 2009

The "soft totalitarianism" of Britain

"BRITAIN appears to be evolving into the first modern soft totalitarian state. As a sometime teacher of political science and international law, I do not use the term totalitarian loosely."

Thus begins this article in the newspaper, The Australian, which points out how people, even children, are being arrested for uttering politically incorrect comments in Britain. I've blogged on this subject before, but there seems to be an unending stream of these examples. For all practical purposes, freedom of speech has been lost in Britain, which is the same thing as thought control.

Freedom is taking a pounding around the western world. The clear trend is the conversion of democracies to bureaucratic dictatorships. Among the pretexts are the concept of "hate speech", which is speech politically powerful groups don't like, and "saving the environment", which is a rationale for government control of all human activity.

What's especially sad is that most people are snoozing while one of the most precious gifts we have, bought at the cost of countless lives, is being taken away without a fight. It will be far more difficult to recover our freedom than it is to lose it.

Young people today face a far different future than those in my baby boom generation. The freedoms we have taken for granted will be distant memories by the time today's 20 somethings reach our age. Unless there is a radical awakening, which seems unlikely given that current trends are in the opposite direction, "soft totalitarianism" will probably be only the first step to the harder kind, and humanity will eventually have to purchase its freedom again at enormous cost in blood.